Before my view soured on the policies of QRP Quarterly (QQ), I produced many articles for them covering Receivers, DCR's, SSB Transceivers and even CW Transceivers. Many of the articles were derived entirely from my original project ideas but some were generated when the editor assigned to me would suggest -- how about an article on this or that subject. Several of these QQ input articles involved CW transceivers since many QRP guys are ardent CW nuts.
Keep in mind I designed the hardware, built the rigs and wrote the articles for zero compensation. My falling out with QQ resulted from an incident where QQ stated that once I submitted the article, they owned the design, the rights and I had no say in the matter.
Essentially, they were stealing my work and receiving benefit from my creativity! In retrospect I think it had more to do with the ego of the then new QQ management. I have vowed to never write for them again and I haven't.
The interesting story about this CW Transceiver shown below is that once it was finished and air tested, I sent it to my QQ editor who was a CW guy. He approved of the final functionality of the product and passed it on to a ham who had no equipment. It was a two-part article.
For those who only build the Bitx design this is no Bitx! However, it has many W7ZOI attributes like a strong post mixer (SBL-1) amplifier and so you don't bang the hell out of the Homebrew Crystal Filter with strong signals, there is a resistive pad following the post mixer amp. It even has a HYCAS IF amp stage. The Product Detector/BFO is a SA612 followed by a 2N3904/LM386 Audio amp.
The transmitter has a SA612 Mixer stage, followed by a BPF, a couple transistors to boost the signal and finally a W3NQN LPF.
The website link has all of the schematics and a parts list (BOM) and parts source. Unlike the MC1496 DCR that appeared in SPRAT, there was not one email or request for information. As far as I was concerned, this a failure of QQ to recognize unless it is a CW Pixie rig no one will invest the time to build this project. It was just beyond the skill set of the current crop of amateur extra licensees. Today 14 years later I think the situation is worse not better. The only reason for this posting is to show what is possible.
This project also is the reason I now never supply part numbers and BOM. My QQ editor wanted to make it so easy to replicate the project that he was adamant about including a parts list by part number so that a would-be wannabe homebrewer would have to do no work. I spent more time on that parts list than the whole project. Initially, I supplied many vendors for the parts. QQ thought that was too hard, so they made me scrub the list, so it was down to just a few vendors.
Basically, all of the efforts to make it so easy to build failed! The one factor not considered by QQ was the ARRL dumbing down the license requirements created a whole new class of appliance operators with no technical skills. Not much has changed since 2011, in fact it is worse.
Before any homebrew wannabe, starts jumping up and down at what looks like simple perforated board, it is actually single sided copper vector board and a superb ground plane. This is a not often used technique and actually more flexible than super glue and small pads. All point-to-point wiring is done on the insulated underside of the copper vector board.
A short side of this design is that it used a VXO for frequency excursions. Thus, it didn't even have an Arduino / Si5351, so no excuses that software is too hard or not on a GitHub which was a driver for the VXO choice.
Them that know can make it go.
73's
Pete N6QW